Skills and weapon damage

The hit damage code basically factors in several things.

The weapon class (WC) of the weapon, (how high level a weapon it is... feather = WC 0, battered sword WC 3, Kraky WC 16, etc etc... (made up figures, btw) ) So the higher WC, the higher damage it's capable of dealing.

The weight of the weapon. (two longswords, both WC 10, weight 4, if you recorded 1000 hits, you'd get the same average damage per hit.... two longswords, both WC 10, one weight 4, one weight 5, the weight 5 weap will have a higher damage per hit average.)

Special attack code in the weapons. (ie. Outstanding Sword's Outstanding attack... Silver Longswords versus undead critters, etc...)

Str of the player wielding the weapon. (Obviously, a 20 str bigass high level orc fighter will hit harder than a puny lvl 19 14 str elf fighter using the same weap.

Berserk / Fury additional damage. (Duh... that'd be why fighters do more raw damage with weaps, cuz they get bonus damage from berserk n fury)

Whatever my rusty non-playing ass is forgetting..... ;)

Traits - this ones obvious, racial hates, and except. str make you hit harder

Position of your critter - again obvious, rogue trips, bola trips, or tower shield bashes make it easier to hit your opponent harder.

Extra levels - these don't make everyone hit harder but I do believe that a) for fighters, fury will work better allowing more hits, and i guess harder?, and b) for rangers, woodcraft will go up this seems to have a big difference

It's clear that the increased woodcraft will make the chance of hitting your strike better, but this doesn't account for the huge difference in normal melee damage of an uber level ranger.

The only thing skills effect is how often you hit. If you take 2 players, both in defend none, same strength, same level, everything else being equal.... with kraky... and one is at 50 skills, and the other at 100, do 1000 hits each, and you record the actual numbers you get from each hit and get the average for each range (tickled, bonecrush, flattened, etc) you'll end up with the same average number of hps for each damage range. (flattened avg 29.3 hps, bc 18.7 hps, etc)

The only real difference is that it might take the 50 skill wimp 1800 rounds to get 1000 hits, while it only takes 1200 hits for the 100 skill guy to get 1000 hits. So yeah, the actual damage per hit would be the same, but the damage you'd do in 1200 rounds, misses included, would be much higher for the 100 skill dude... but that's just cuz he'd hit more often... not harder.

Exceptional strength

A few numbers from my logging and testing for corroboration. I logged about half a million rounds of combat between staff skill 88 and 100. Here are some numbers from a lower point and higher point [edit for iron-shod], between which no stats changed.

         Skill     91     98

  You battered   0.9%   1.0%
  You pummeled   1.0%   1.4%
   You clubbed   5.6%   5.6%
   You pounded  26.4%  26.1%
You bludgeoned  59.0%  58.1%
  You hammered   7.1%   7.7%
You pulverised   0.0%   0.0%
(% hits only)

        Rounds  10242  17878
          Hits   7891  14098
        Misses   2351   3780
        Miss %  23.0%  21.1%

The percentages are the roughly the same between 91 and 98. There were no changes in stats or traits that would affect the numbers. I didn't take into account any specials that may have been present but did not apply any myself.

Then I took exceptional strength and the percentages changed. Pounded and clubbed went down 4% between them and bludgeoned and hammer up. I also only logged a pulverize twice (go wuss me), once at 99 after having taken exceptional strength and again yesterday at 97 (death sucks). I don’t think I can draw conclusions yet until I see more and log 97 through 100 again with exceptional strength, but it is interesting to see that I logged no pulverize through all those rounds and skill ranges where the percentages stayed consistent until I took the strength trait and the percentages changed.